Senior Studio Fall 2021

I have been doing research into the different names companies use to label their foundation shades. My memories of makeup shopping were always of precious comparisons like porcelain and ivory for light tones whereas darker tones get things like sand and dirt, and options were limited. Rihanna's company Fenty Beauty has recently (within the last several years) come out with a line of foundations with over 40 different shades labelled by number to eliminate the usage of descriptive words that describe darker skin by lesser precious terms and avoid comparison to objects based on your skintone. I also have some tights of different shades that take me back to when I was a dancer and required to buy a shade of tights that didn't match my skin because at least they would help me match the other little girls a little bit better. Things like the shade of tights, the comments about how my hair didn't match, and other judgement from the white people around me drove me out of mainstrea...

Thinking about how I would like to display the hair products and potential instructional/ how-to. Also looking at addressing the names of foundation shades in makeup.  

 Below are the results from my 23&Me test. The results are interesting to me, but I'm more interested by the fact that I have no familial relatives from my paternal side that have taken a 23&Me test. Any familial results are white of European descent and the closest relation is 5th cousin.

 I attempted a looping video of the braid removal as suggested by Don and I didn't find that it gave the sense of time and labour that I want it to convey. I am interested in doing a step-by-step instructional pamphlet to be displayed next to the products or to be stand-alone pamphlets. I would like them to look like assembly instructions where they say things like apply product A to ____ and use object B to do ____. David's comment asking if the hair was still as precious to me made me think about how I felt about it. I don't think that the synthetic hair is as precious to me once it has been removed from my head, but I do think that my actual hair that I have kept from past haircuts is still precious to me and I would not like people just manhandling it as they please.

some of my internal thoughts surrounding myself and my identity.  

  Worn: Shaping Black Feminine Identity  Victorian mourning dress made from synthetic hair that is regularly used for Black braided hairstyles. This dress represents both the pride and discomfort with which the artist wears her biracial identity, much like how a Victorian woman would have worn a dress of this style.